The BBC article said “Prince Harry, 20, appears to be wearing a German desert uniform and a swastika armband.”
Harry’s a tool. Here’s hoping William turns out to be pretty virile.
You mean the Pickelhaube?
I still stand by my Red Baron idea. He was pretty cool.
Or hey – how about one of the Cossacks?
No, technically they weren’t. The Wehrmacht was the German Army. They were only Nazis in the sense that all Germans were Nazis.
Or go dressed as a caveman, get really drunk, and say you’ve been “bombed back into the stone age.”
Note I admitted I was wrong in post #16. 
Slithy Tove, better yet, go as a hippie covered in soot and say you’ve been stoned back to the bomb age. groan
For a Soviet-type uniform on the cheap, run down to your local surplus store. They should have visor hats, trousers, jackets, acceptable belts, satchels with red stars on them, boots… The costume won’t be historically accurate, but good enough for Halloween – unless you want to spend the money to do it right. And the Soviets aren’t the bogeymen that Germans are.
What kind of sense is that? Is it also commonly believed that everyone in America is a member of the Democratic Party?
Actually, if I recall correctly no member of the Wehrmacht was a member of the Nazi party; there were laws in place enforcing a strict separation of politics and the military.
You could try this site.
It’s based in India, so I don’t know about delivery times, but the prices should be reasonable. I believe their major business is supplying film companies. A friend of mine has got a Luftwaffe officers cap from them. http://www.replicaters.com/ww2arfrikakorp.html
(address as in webpage)
A slight aside but another poster here (who shall remain nameless, mwah!) told me before that people at a Sherlock Holmes convention had taken umbrage at his costume for a character from the Holmes universe because it included some German WWI artefact, I think an Iron Cross.
Really? What a bunch of morons. (Considering that the Iron Cross goes back to the early 1800s.) You’d think they’d know that it wasn’t a Nazi symbol.
The “outrage” over that was a whole load of tabloid generated pish. It’s a perfectly usual British thing to mock and make light of really bad things. Christ, 'Allo, 'Allo! was a very popular long-running TV series extracting comedy value from the day to day terrors of being in the French Resistance (and being French generally, to be fair). Dad’s Army was one of the finest ensemble comedies ever made, and that was about the ill-equipped last-ditch suicide squads that were raised in case of invasion, armed with a rusty old shotgun, some garden hoes, and an armoured butcher’s van. OK, it was also about class and manners, but still.
Not that I am recommending you turn up at a fancy dress party in the admittedly rather swish Hugo Boss designed garb of an SS Obergruppenführer, Curtis. Know your audience!
I believe though that Harry has been known to use words like “towelhead” and “paki” etc.
“Gentlemen, we have uncovered the origin of the superstitious belief that it’s bad luck to place your hat on a chair.”
I’m surprised at the general feeling that seems to be that going as a WWII soldier is somehow a ghastly idea. That seems to me to be the sort of thing Halloween is about. It is fairly common for people to dress up as a recently deceased person or Stalin or something like that. I would think that a constume like this wouldn’t cause a problem if:
- It was perceived as clever or original in some way (e.g. you don’t just go as a Nazi and stand around yelling “Seig Heil!”, thinking it is hillarious)
- The person dressing up wasn’t the type that, when people saw him dressed up as a Nazi, thougt to themselves “Well, that makes sense”.
Well, some were. Most were not.
Wehrmacht means “Armed forces.” (It does not, common to popular belief, refer just to the Army.) It literally encompassed every single person in all branches of the German armed services, most of whom were not members of the Nazi Party or in the Waffen SS.
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Actually, if I recall correctly no member of the Wehrmacht was a member of the Nazi party; there were laws in place enforcing a strict separation of politics and the military
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This, however, is just plainly false. For one thing, it makes no sense; there were not only not any such laws, but it would have been completely against the fundamental philosophy of the Nazi Party to create such a law. For another, again, the Waffen SS was part of the Wehrmacht.
At its peak about ten percent of the population of Germany were card-carrying Nazis - actually, maybe not quite that many, but close, IIRC.
That is an extremely doubtful assertion, the SS having a different origin and command chain before the war, and at best a tenuous one during. They were the military wing of the Party.
You can check out the Axis Forums and look for the “for sale” forums and they have real WWII stuff for sale.
This, however, is just plainly false. For one thing, it makes no sense; there were not only not any such laws, but it would have been completely against the fundamental philosophy of the Nazi Party to create such a law. For another, again, the Waffen SS was part of the Wehrmacht.
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Actually it is completely true. Those who were in active service in the Reichswehr and later the Wehrmacht were constitutionally prohibited from voting in elections or joining a political party. However, from 1934 they were made to swear a personal oath of allegiance to the Führer and most young recruits were indoctrinated with the Nazi ideology, so many of them became fanatically loyal to it.